Your friendly neighbourhood geek

How do I stop getting spammed on Skype?

I keep getting invitations by different people trying to spam me with different invitations to chat, buy pharmaceuticals or increase the size of different parts of my body. Is there any way I can turn it off?

This was one reason why a friend of mine stopped using Skype, he kept getting all sorts of spam by different people he didn’t know. Unfortunately spam is a pretty pervasive feature of the Internet nowadays and new waves are targeting Instant Messaging clients. Skype is no exception and unfortunately waves of spam tend to increase over time rather than die away. Thank you very much, but if I was after medicines, individual health insurance or Spanish lotteries, I know how to find them on my own.

Luckily, it’s relatively easy to block people from sending you spam in Skype. You can do this by telling Skype that you only want to accept messages from people on your contact lie. Click on Tools-Options and then choose the Privacy tab. This is what your dialog box looks like:

The default option on this dialog box is to allow anyone to contact you, but you can very easily switch it to only allowing people on your contact list get in touch. Flick the switch, save your options and you’re set!

This does not work. You can set Skype to only allow your contact and still receive just as many spam messages. I don’t know how and Skype doesn’t seem to give a toss. The only way I can see of dealing with it is to use another form of messaging. I wonder if Skype get kickbacks themselves.

Just checked the skype forums to see how to block the spam IM’s… as you know if you’re here reading these comments, nothing works… there is an option you can select for receiving video (NO ONE), but not for IM’s or invitations… these skaggs use skypes own handy dandy built in DIRECTORY to search and compile lists. All skype needs to do is add an extra option to select that says “accept IM’s from NO ONE”, like the video option. Jeez. Anyway, there are TWO companies coming out this fall or the first of 2010 that will be competing directly with skype… if they haven’t fixed this, I’m gone!